Harold Pinter said about Beckett:
“The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.”
Irish playwright Brendan Behan once said:
“I don’t understand what Samuel Beckett’s works are about,” he said. “But I don’t understand what a swim in the ocean is about. I just love the flow of the water over my body.”
In honor I present to you the following post from Irish blogger Lucy:
Have you seen/heard this? Bono’s tribute to Beckett:
http://www.u2.com/news/index.php?mode=full&news_id=1923
Text of his reading is here:
http://www.u2.com/news/index.php?mode=full&news_id=1924
I’d forgotten completely about that post, Sheila – “makes absolutely NO sense” – haha
And if I’d spotted the Behan quote earlier I would have used it in my original post.
But the RTE archive will probably be worth re-visiting. They’ll link to each of the radio plays after broadcasting.
Tonight, however, if I’m still conscious, the yurt will be viewing Krapp’s Last Tape from the Beckett on Film series.. with John Hurt.
Although Beckett is best known for his plays, I love his trilogy of novels. On my Irish lit course, when we were forced to read Yeats’s A Vision, we used a quote from The Unnamable to describe the experience: “I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”